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During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a smart, funny, and youthfully attractive female actor. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She played Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a dodgy past. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, acted by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that the public loved, which carried on into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: The Shirley Valentine Film

However, the pinnacle of greatness occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey opened the door for later hits like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a uplifting, funny, bright story with a wonderful character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of female sexuality that did not conform by traditional male perspectives about youthful innocence.

Her portrayal of Shirley anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to fading into the background.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the lead role of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unexpectedly sensual relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then victoriously selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley's Journey

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic Liverpool homemaker who is weary with daily routine in her forties in a dull, unimaginative country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she gets the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull UK tourist she’s traveled with – remains once it’s finished to experience the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the charming resident, Costas, acted with an striking moustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Bold, open the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to share with us what she’s thinking. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the United Kingdom when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

Following the film, the actress continued to have a vibrant work on the stage and on television, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the league of Russell who could give her a true main character.

She appeared in Roland Joffé’s adequate set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and POW in Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's film about gender, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

However, she discovered herself frequently selected in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about old people, which were beneath her talents, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (although a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable fortune teller alluded to by the movie's title.

Yet on film, her performance as Shirley gave her a remarkable moment in the sun.